Tilera Unveils Processors with Up to 36 Programmable Cores

Tilera Corp., a developer of programmable many-core microprocessors, has announced several significant steps for the company including the immediate general availability of two of its low-power 64-bit processors – Tile-Gx36 and Tile-Gx16 – as well as companion evaluation systems.

Many-core chips by Tilera features devices with 16 to 100 identical processor cores (tiles) interconnected with Tilera's iMesh on-chip network. Each tile consists of a complete, full-featured processor as well as L1 and L2 cache and a non-blocking switch that connects the tiles into the mesh. Each tile can independently run a full operating system, or multiple tiles taken together can run a multiprocessing OS like SMP Linux. TileDirect technology provides coherent I/O directly into the tile caches to deliver ultimate low-latency packet processing performance. Tilera's DDC (Dynamic Distributed Cache) system for fully coherent cache across the tile array enables scalable performance for threaded and shared memory applications.

The Tile-Gx processors are programmed in ANSI standard C and C++. Tiles can be grouped in clusters to apply the appropriate amount of horsepower to each application. Since multiple, virtualized operating system instances can be run on the Tile-Gx simultaneously, it can replace multiple CPU and DSP subsystems for both the data plane and control plane.

Tile-Gx36 and Tile-Gx16 64-bit processors, fabricated in 40 nm, are now generally available to customers. The devices contain 36 and 16 full featured cores, respectively, providing never-before-seen performance and performance-per-watt, according to Tilera:

The Tile-Gx36 (1.40GHz) has demonstrated an industry-best CoreMark score of over 165 000 (over 60% higher compared to Intel Core i7-2600K), while consuming a fraction of the power of the nearest competitor.

In networking, a single Tile-Gx36 can deliver more than 40 gigabits per-second of L2/L3 packet forwarding performance across small and large packet sizes using less than 25W of power.In cloud, a single Tile-Gx36-based server can provide better performance than a Xeon-based system at one-fifth the power and one-eighth the space.

These performance numbers enable customers to add more services into their networking infrastructure equipment, support more video capabilities in their media applications, and reduce overall cost and power consumption in datacenters, Tilera claims.

Tilera evaluation systems are immediately available in multiple form-factors, scaling from compact size PCIe cards to high performance appliances. The Tilera PCIe cards offer the industry’s first 36-core PCIe half-size card. The full featured appliance scales from a single 36-core TILE-Gx processor to a four processor 1U appliance with a total of 144 cores per 1U box. Additional boards and systems from our partners will be announced later in the year.